Dem Rep.: Fire DNC Officials Who Raised Bernie Sanders’s Religion

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told Breitbart News on Thursday night on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that the party officials who brought up Bernie Sanders’s religion should be fired.

Late last week, internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails released by Wikileaks showed that party officials had colluded to assist former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and keep Sen. Sanders (I-VT) from winning the nomination.

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One email, from DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall, discussed using Sanders’s religion against him. Sanders is Jewish, but Marshall presumed he was an atheist, and the apparent intent was to expose that among conservative voters.

The email read:

It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

As Breitbart News noted, the email was sent to several senior officials, including CEO Amy Dacey, who replied “AMEN.” (Marshall has since apologized publicly.)

“My reaction was that was terrible,” Nadler told Breitbart News. “Whoever did that ought to be fired.”

However, Nadler was at pains to defend the DNC itself.

“On the other hand, what nobody’s mentioning is the DNC didn’t do that. That was a private email within the DNC. So somebody makes a recommendation, ‘We ought to do this,’ somebody else says, ‘Knock it off’ — we don’t know who that was — but it wasn’t done.”

New DNC chair Donna Brazile told Katie Couric of Yahoo! News this week that Marshall would not be fired over the incident:

When I read Brad’s email, and I’ve known him for 20 years, I called him and said, “Brad that was wrong, that’s inappropriate.” I apologized to the Sanders people immediately on Saturday morning. In fact, I took an earlier train … because I wanted to nip that in the bud. I’m going to handle all of these situations, but I want have some standards. I’m not throwing anybody under the bus. I want to have touch standards, the same standards that basically forced me to resign in the Dukakis campaign back in 1988 … I’m going to give everybody an opportunity to do the right thing, but I will not tolerate this within the Democratic Party or any institution I’m involved in.

Nadler, who represents a district with a significant Jewish population, added that if the DNC officials responsible were not fired, they should have to explain “how they could say such a thing.”